SITTING DUCK YOGA

The Fine Art of Not Giving a Quack There is letting go, and then there is Let Go. Most of us are already quite familiar with the first kind. We let go when we get a massage. We let go in savasana. We let go on vacation, in the bathtub, after the second glass of wine, during a walk in the woods or for twelve miraculous minutes before somebody sends us a text that requires an immediate and unnecessarily complicated response. Then we pick everything back up. This is perfectly understandable. We have things to do. People depend on us. Bills arrive. Bodies hurt. Cars make noises. Parents age. Children call. Work happens. The future remains remarkably unwilling to tell us what it has planned. So we hold. And because holding gets exhausting, we become interested in letting go. We take yoga classes, meditate, journal, breathe, stretch, talk to therapists, buy candles and occasionally lie on the floor wondering how our shoulders managed to migrate all the way up to our ears. None of this is necessarily bad. Some of it is wonderful. But Sitting Duck Yoga begins with an uncomfortable little paraduck: What if occasionally letting go and living in a state of Let Go are two entirely different things?

THE DUCK HAS A PROBLEM The phrase sitting duck does not ordinarily inspire confidence. A sitting duck is vulnerable. Exposed. An easy target. Hunting season is presumably not an ideal time to become one. So the sensible duck prepares. It keeps one eye open. It watches the horizon. It studies hunters. It prepares escape routes. It strengthens its wings. It researches the ten warning signs that you may unknowingly be surrounded by duck hunters. It listens to a podcast about boundaries. It purchases an excellent security system for the pond. Perhaps it becomes very, very good at being ready. There is only one problem. It never gets to be a duck. Perfect defense requires permanent vigilance. And permanent vigilance means that even on the most beautiful afternoon, with sunlight dancing across the pond and absolutely nothing happening, the duck is somewhere else. It is preparing for what might happen next. This is not merely a duck problem. YOU CANNOT BE READY FOR EVERYTHING There is no amount of preparation that will make a human being 100 percent ready for life. You can prepare for some things, and obviously you should. Wear the seat belt. Buy the smoke detector. Save some money. Learn how to swim before wandering into the deep end of the pond. But there is another kind of readiness that has very little to do with practical preparation. It is the internal readiness for something to go wrong. It lives in the jaw, the breath, the belly, the shoulders and the innumerable tiny ways we hold ourselves together. It can continue while we are eating breakfast, answering email, making love, walking the dog or supposedly relaxing. It says: Just in case. And there is no finish line for just in case. You cannot be mostly finished preparing for the unknown because the unknown has not submitted an itinerary. You cannot finally relax after considering every possible calamity because the imagination can manufacture calamities indefinitely. The duck could keep one eye open. But then the duck is still keeping one eye open. LETTING GO IS NOT LET GO MODE This is where Sitting Duck Yoga parts company with the usual conversation about stress. Most of us think of letting go as something we do in response to holding. First comes tension; then we notice it; then perhaps we do something to release it. This can become a lifelong cycle: Hold → suffer → notice → release → hold again. We become increasingly sophisticated at managing the consequences of holding without ever questioning the holding itself. Sitting Duck Yoga asks a different question: What happens if Let Go is no longer the remedy? What happens if it becomes the state from which we live? That is a much bigger proposition. It means we are no longer waiting until Friday night, vacation, yoga class, retirement or the hypothetical future moment when everything has finally been taken care of. We are also not promising ourselves that we will gradually chip away at twenty years of tension until one glorious Tuesday we finally qualify for peace. We enter Let Go Mode now. Not because everything has been resolved. Because everything will never be resolved. STOP SPLASHING Patañjali gives us an extraordinarily useful place to enter the pond: Yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ. Yoga is commonly translated as the cessation, restraint or stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. Sitting Duck Yoga has another way of looking at it: Yoga is when the duck stops splashing. When the ripples settle, the pond appears. You do not still the water. You stop stirring it. That distinction is enormous. Trying very hard to make water still is absurd. Every attempt to flatten a ripple creates another ripple. The water already knows how to become still. The duck’s contribution is remarkably modest: Stop messing with it. This is also the essential difference between trying to let go and entering Let Go. One is another activity performed by the person who is holding. The other changes the premise. ALL OR NOTHING This may be the most difficult part of Sitting Duck Yoga because it sounds extreme at first. Let Go Mode is all or nothing. That does not mean a person in Let Go Mode will never become startled, angry, afraid, muscularly tense or deeply concerned again. A duck is not anesthetized. A duck responds to what is actually happening. The all-or-nothing part concerns the underlying agreement. Are you fundamentally living in readiness and occasionally letting go? Or are you fundamentally living in Let Go and responding when life actually requires something from you? Those are not different quantities of relaxation. They are different orientations. The first duck believes vigilance is home and relaxation is a vacation. The second duck makes Let Go home. And then develops it. Maintains it. Deepens it. That duck can still move very quickly when necessary. In fact, it may respond better because it is responding to what actually happened rather than simultaneously responding to seventeen things that might. YOU ARE A SITTING DUCK This brings us back to the supposedly terrible predicament of being a sitting duck. Perhaps vulnerability was never the problem. Perhaps the problem was spending an entire life trying not to be vulnerable in a universe that has made no promise whatsoever that we won’t get wet. You cannot guarantee that nobody will hurt you. You cannot guarantee that the body will remain healthy. You cannot guarantee that the money will last, the relationship will work, the weather will cooperate or tomorrow will resemble the plan you made for it. You are already a sitting duck. The question is whether you are going to spend your life acting like a target because of it. There is an enormous difference between being available to reality and rehearsing your defense against reality. Sitting Duck Yoga is interested in the former. LIFE REORGANIZES AROUND YOU Something curious begins to happen when holding is no longer your default. You move differently. You breathe differently. You listen differently. You don’t have to fill every silence. You don’t prepare your response while somebody else is speaking. You become harder to hurry. You notice the ground. You feel gravity instead of constantly negotiating with it. You stop spending enormous amounts of energy responding to events that have not occurred. And because you change, your interactions change. This does not require a mystical explanation. Other people respond to posture, timing, facial expression, tone, boundaries, attention and countless other signals. Decisions made without panic lead somewhere different from decisions made while braced for catastrophe. A body that is available to the present has options a body busy defending itself from the future cannot see. In that very practical sense, life reorganizes around you because you are no longer organizing yourself around fear of life. That may be one of the largest promises of Sitting Duck Yoga. Not that nothing bad will happen. Not that you will cease caring. Not that you become passive, oblivious or magically waterproof. You become present enough to meet what actually arrives without carrying everything that hasn’t. NOT GIVING A QUACK And perhaps this is where the subtitle requires clarification. The art of not giving a quack does not mean not caring. Quite the opposite. If you are no longer giving a quack about every hypothetical judgment, imagined catastrophe, old grievance, future conversation and passing disturbance, you suddenly have considerably more of yourself available for the things you genuinely care about. You can love without gripping. Work without becoming the work. Prepare without living in preparation. Respond without rehearsing. Rest without earning it. Stand without holding yourself up quite so much. And perhaps, eventually, sit beside the pond without keeping one eye open. The world will continue being the world. Hunters may exist. Storms will arrive. Ripples will happen. The practice is not to control the pond. The practice is not even to become a better duck. Stop splashing. And see what happens. 🦆